CatastrophicFailure

OK I can grasp that. Do you use specific apoapsis heights for each step or does it vary by situation? Do you burn directly towards a maneuver node or simply prograde? Cool model. How far out is Pluto at that scale? I'm guessing from that map it's into miles at least.

That's what I was thinking, but doesn't it play hell with timing your ejection?

No, I'm laughing hysterically.

Broke down & signed up for a reddit account lol. Wasted hours of real time trying to get a 20 minute burn figured out so I could get my tanker on the way to Laythe. Node kept wanting me to burn THROUGH Kerbin till my periapse dipped into the atmosphere. Finally had to try it from a much higher orbit. Is there any better way to manage high deltaV/low-TWR burns like that? Anyways, finally got the resupply mission to Laythe and managed to rendezvous & dock with the unmanned (at the moment) Righteous Indignation III. Filled the main tank up, topped off RCS on the simple lander. Now I need to ditch all the empty bits and drop the hab down to the crew waiting on the surface who have been living out of a wrecked lander for about a year now. Then they get to wait another three years on a tropical Laythean beach till the window to Eeloo comes round.

Am I the only one here struck by the irony of this back & forth over mathematics with posts rife with spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors? (I wonder how many of the do-it-yourself-ers are using spell check lol)

I HATE math. So I let MechJeb do it

More like that comet that hit Jupiter a few years back. No surprise everything grinds to a halt before hitting the "surface," that far down the atmosphere is more like a liquid. Hitting a liquid tends to stop most things pretty darn quick

What, precisely, is happening when you try to play or start a game?

'91 according to the wiki. Since you mentioned it I had to go dig up the intro. You weren't kidding, any more cheese they could sell pizzas. Still can't remember a durn thing about the show its self tho, which is wierd cuz I know I used to watch it. Here, in all its highly reflective glory, is my RI3 (the RI2 met with a bugged save file). Plugging some numbers into that handy delta V calculator, it does indeed save around 800 mps taking the obvious route to Dres first.

Ok, you're old fashioned :-P. At this point I trust computers far more than people to control such things lol. Also keep in mind, when the first crew rides that capsule it will probably have been extensively tested with unmanned flights. That specific capsule I mean, not just the design. Not so. The current version of the Dragon does indeed use parachutes to return. It's still the only privately financed craft to orbit AND RETURN from space. Yes, the unmanned variant is designed to be reusable and return a small cargo from space. The engines in the vid are still conceptual. IIRC they're also (planned) to be the launch abort engines so will have to be pretty darn reliable.

Yup that's where I got the name, tho I had to google it myself to remember what it was from. Remember absolutely nothing else about the show but the name's stuck with me all these years.

Right, but the crew & ship is already at Laythe, so... Thanx for the link tho, that'll be all sorts of useful for mulling over transfers away from home. Wow and it's telling me up to 5 years at Eeloo waiting for a Dres window. That's a long time throwing nitrogen-snowballs at each other!

Thats how this flight started too, supposed to be just a Joolian moon tour. Now I'm just killing kerbals time till .21 comes out and finally kills wahoonie-shaped save for good and I can get "serious" again. Don't have the patience for the whole kethane thing at the moment. The main ship, which the crew has rechristened the Righteous Indignation III has a delta-v budget around 13 kps fully fueled, so I figure from this point I'll just need to send a couple of tankers here & there. Everything after Dres will need specialized landers anyway so it's pretty straightforward to send some extra fuel along to be waiting at the target. Yes, modded up the yin-yang. Hybrid ion engines and a bunch of Soviet pack parts mostly. Still figuring how exactly to do the Eve return. Thinking I might try an ion powered aircraft with a small rocket to kick the one Kerbal capsule back to orbit. Bunch of fellows all named Kerman IIRC. My .20 saves have both gone so completely Kerbal I stopped keeping track of names weeks ago. AND this flight started with three, now there are six...? Little green buggers are actually breeding. Not sure if I want to bring those extra three along or not. Maybe I'll just leave them on Laythe & see what comes of it.

Now that they've landed on every Joolian moon and arrived at Laythe, my ambitious crew has decided to do the full grand tour, wait out the three year transfer window to Eeloo, and from there planet hop down to Moho, being reapplied en route. So for the next step, what's the most efficient route? Dres is closest of course, but that makes for an ugly plane change and a lot of delta v to capture into orbit. Duna is farther but has an atmosphere for aerocapture, plus a potential boost from Ike departing, but then it's backtracking to Dres. Input?

...same could be said for one good parachute hiccup. By the time any potential engine hiccup could occur, it's too low for backup chutes anyway. Damned impressive vid. That's some serious landing precision by a computer there. Wonder why the tips of the gear are smoking?

Interesting.... I know the bodies are on rails and not truly affected by each others gravity, so what would happen to orbiters & landers if Gilly dipped into the atmosphere? ( I'm assuming any actual contact between planets would either have no effect or end in a system-eating Kraken showing up)

So I was mulling over the idea of hyperediting Gilly over as a moon of Kerbin, because I love playing around there but it's too durn far away. Pondering what kind of orbit to give it, I got to wondering: given the relative (ridiculous) densities of the two, what would be a "realistic" Roche limit between them? Using the old Kerbal stand by that everything is one tenth "real life," I figured somewhere between 1000 & 1800 km. Anything more involved than that makes my brain hurt, but I'm betting there are some folks around here who could give me a ridiculously accurate number AND actually enjoy coming up with it.

Sure it is. Going over there, and there, and there, and there, and another bit over here. Going pretty quickly by the looks of it.

Got to space today. Got all the way to Tylo. For some reason mechjeb plopped me down 15k short of my target (the cave). That's ok, I brought along a rover for just that possibility. Then spent the next couple hours watching it flip, flop, & explode trying to actually GET there. (Going just a wee bit too fast makes things explode, but hitting the brakes makes things flip THEN explode, go figure). Funny part is, not even my fails fail right. There were several Times the rover started flipping, knocked the Kerbal off, then just for a moment looked like it might land back on its wheels undamaged, making for a great story back at the space lounge later. Nope. Upside down every durn time. Or right side up but poor Jorhner had already become part of the lithosphere. Finally managed to get there, plant a flag, fall down a lot, try to drive the rover up the walls, and made it back to the lander. Now I've gotta get him off this curséd rock.

Put my first Kerbal on Typo. Brought along a rover. Even landed within a rovable distance of my target. Then found a big hill & decided to see if my rover could survive doing 50+ mps down the side. Nope.

The solution is to run multiple installs of KSP. I've got a crewed grand tour going at the moment that's gone completely Kerbal but I'm not quite willing to give up on yet. If .21 comes out tomorrow (hypothetically, yeah right) I'd just do a separate install & see if I lose interest. My Steam install is actually still at .19, I haven't touched since the last update when a lot of mods broke and (despite following the instructions to stop it) Steam wouldn't let me play without updating.

Curse you. That made me LOL in public and now everyone's staring at me. Anyways, all three of my saves are ALREADY so buggered from .20 "issues" I can't wait to blow them all to heck & start fresh. Anyone in the same boat?

Duna is indeed named for a warrior-god, Ike was his estranged illegitimate son. During an epic battle they wounded a bystander who got too close, called Dres, leaving her with a deep gash on her cheek, and so were sentenced by the other gods to spend all eternity circling and staring at each other but unable to cross the distance & fight.

Altitude.... Check. Positive vertical speed... Check. Parachute....doh!

Who cares? Launch it and record what happens! actually what you did is accidentally duplicate a good chunk of your rocket. Can happen if you click too fast or the game lags at the wrong time.